ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area What's the Strangest or Funniest Service Call?

my fav was the guy who called berating the local hardware store.

seems they sold him everything he needed to switch a (formerly pullchain) cieling lumianare

anyways, he did a rather good job of installing the old work steel box, s.p. switch and plate in the wall

'cept there was no wire........

~S

Does this one count? I use to work for someone and the local creamatory/mausolium (did I spell them correctly?) called usand said, "We have a body half bunt in the crematory oven. The power went out and we can't get it to go back on. We need someone quick, because we have a half cooked body. Please come over and get our oven working now please." We got there and found a bad safety zone valve (or something) This job happened to be and my old boss about 1975-1984. I don't remember exactly.

Harold

Bill,
Here's a call-out that stands out for me.
Just got home from work at 7pm one night and my cellphone goes, there's an elderly lady on the other end, yelling to me about the fact that she has no Hot water.
I thought this will be easy, just a blown fuse, so I turn up there and check the ripple controls and all the fuses on the Night rate supply they're all OK, get up in the ceiling check the HW Cylinder, it's OK, but somehow I can hear water running.
I go and check the taps and the shower is running full blast (cold water).
I told her what I had found and she said that she had a guest staying over the night previous and she had had a shower prior to leaving at 0630 this morning, the shower had been running all this time, as my customer had a hearing problem.
Simple but strange, eh?.

Awhile back, I was called by the new owners of an old mansion on the bluffs of the Mississippi River to unravel the mysteries of the wiring in their home. I discovered a lot of creative wiring, but that's a whole seperate story.

The third day I was there, while uncovering the buried and paneled over original fuse center at the foot of the basement stairs, I became aware of a great caterwaller and rumpous up on the second floor.

I ran up the stairs to meet Mrs. Homeowner and daughter rushing down from the second. Seems that the son had finally prised open the one stuck drawer in the built in set of drawers in the secret room behind the moveable storage shelves in the second floor bath. The drawer was empty, but for a human skull. He had walked in on his mom and sister holding high the prize he had found. . .

They did not share his opinion and ran screaming to call the police.

The skull was without identifying marks. The police determined it used to be a thirty some female, and eventually returned it to the family. The son latched onto it an gave it its own wooden case.

well that's one way to get ahead Al

Here's another one,
I was on Faults call-out one weekend last year and got sent out to a house way out in the sticks.
Long story longer, the complaint was that the Range(Cooker) wouldn't work.
Got there and all 3 DDO's had dropped, so there was no power at all to the house.
Put all the DDO's back in no worries and changed the Secondaries no problems, I happened to do a bit of a walk around the house to see if there might have been something else that might have caused the Secondaries to trip, well, I got around the other side of the house and what I saw, astounded me.
There was a TRENCH and the mains coming in through the back of the house were sticking up in the air and were joined with Tape(PVC Insulation tape), this was 400V 3p +N BTW, hence the blown Secondaries and DDO's.
Turns out what had happened was the guy had dug a trench for a new pump water feed and never even knew that the Mains came in from that side of the house.
I rejoined the mains and I might add I got a FREE Home cooked meal out of it, too!.
Sorry if I have waffled on too much.
But, the spoils of being a Faults-man, eh?
It almost makes up for all the times that I have been caught out in the heavy snow and so-forth!.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 08-09-2003).]

Maybe not strictly electrical, however kind of.

At my wife's old job in the break room they had their paper shredder. Every time someone shredded some papers the micorwave would turn on.

At my old job as the facility guy. I got a call one time that Peggy's phone was not working. It just made a bunch of noises when she dialed. I went to her desk and she had bumped thw switch from tone to pulse.

Another time I got a call from the receptionist that the front doors kept opening on their own. I thought to myself, no big deal, this always happens when someone moves the plants closer to the door. Then when the leaves move the motion detector sees motion and opens the door. However this time that was not the problem. So I look around some more and keep looking. Finally I find that a very, very small spider was on the head of the motion detector. You could not see it unless you looked really hard for it. However since it was on the motion detector every time that it moved it opened the doors.
Scott

I know I've had my share of strange/funny service calls, but only one comes to mind.

Back when I was younger and hungier I had a customer with outlets not working in the kitchen backsplash. I thought it would be the GFI, but it wasn't. The outlets had #12 backstabbed and had corroded from the cat peeing/spraying them. Yes, you read that right, apparantly the cat got his jollies that way. I fixed 2 of them and that made them all work. I suggested replacing them all, because the cat used all of them, but the customer didn't want to pay. It was so nasty that I swore I wouldn't do it again, but when they called me in another month, I was hungry again and went back to replace the others.

I can now say I'm not hungry enough to do that job or to make an employee do it, hope I never get that hungry again.

[This message has been edited by Electric Eagle (edited 08-10-2003).]

An electrician friend of a friend had a falling out with his boss. The boss did something that really made his subordinate feel cheated and wronged. The electrician sought revenge.

His last job for the company was to rope a 2 story house. He wired the house up all right. He wired everything from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and everything from the 2nd floor to the first floor. It passed rough inspection - nobody noticed the routing of all the wires. The wronged electrician then quit his job and departed, never to return.

After being trimmed out for final and the power was turned on, strange things happened. When you turned on a switch downstairs, a light upstairs would turn on. When you turned on a bedroom light switch upstairs, the garbage disposal downstairs would come on, and things like that.

Here's another one.

A veteran electrician I worked with told me a story of how one of the crews on a jobsite was playing their radio really loud, and he got tired of listening to rap. He was a diehard rock guy with country roots.

When the rap crew left for lunch, somebody wound up turning the radio off.

The old electrician was ready for them when they returned.

He went to the panel, right to the circuit their radio was connected to, then he disconnected the neutral from the neutral bus bar and attached it to a circuit breaker. Now the circuit is 208 volts.

When the rap crew came back from lunch, they turned the radio on.

I asked him what happened next. He said, "Well, first the radio got real loud. Then, after a few seconds, it burned up."

I asked what happened after that. He said, "I put the neutral back on the neutral bus bar, walked out there and asked them what happened, they said the radio burned up and something must be wrong with the electrical. I checked it with my meter right in front of them and said that it's 120 volts, everything looks fine!"

harold endean:

What a half-baked request!